نشریه اقتصاد و برنامه ریزی شهری
سال چهارم شماره 13 (بهار 1391)

Achieving urban sustainable development is among the urban managers’ and planners’ important concerns. Due to an increase in urbanization, goods and services are always in great demand in the cities and, hence, satisfying the citizens’ requirements requires sufficient financial resources. However, what is of note in financing resources is taking natural resources and environment into consideration in a way that it turns incomes into sustainable ones and it does not pose any threat to urban sustainable development. As a result, it seems essential to utilize economic instruments which suit environment management the best. However, it should be noted that development requires precise planning and should be in conjunction with the conditions and the status of countries. Urban sustainable development which meets the current needs of the world, without endangering the future generations’ potentials for satisfying their own requirements, is on three principles: environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, and social sustainability. The current article, which takes a practical approach to the issue, utilizing the previous research, at first defines economic instruments, and then investigates into the effects of such instruments on the environment, resulting in the urban sustainable development. Moreover, the common methods of valuing natural resources and the experience of some countries are referred to.

Local governments, especially the municipalities as operational organizations of managerial section in public sector, are in need of providing sustainablefinancial resources. From among the methods of providing sustainable financial resources in institutionalization of social responsibilities of urban management, such issues as utilizing the potentials of the private sector, using new instruments for providing finance, making use of the potentials of financial institutions of the nation, and designing patterns for attracting financial resources could be mentioned. The fast-paced increase in urban population and assigning some of the responsibilities of the government to municipalities would result in a drastic rise in the financial requirements of the municipalities. What comes of note is achieving a sustainable pattern for economic resources to provide the finance for the common and developmental costs the cities require, enabling them to pave the way for making investment in the system of urban development infrastructure and the related welfare services possible; an issue which is always one of the main concerns of the urban managers. As in addition to the limited financial resources coming from managerial and services income of the municipalities, being dependent on such resources and failing to apply financial cooperation system, all in all, could end in a gap between city management system and the citizens. In this article, attempts have been made to investigate the role of providing sustainable financial resources in the improvement of income resources of urban management, utilizing descriptive-analytical methods. To this end, first of all, an investigation is made into the income resources of the municipalities of both the developed and developing countries and a comparison is made between the municipalities of the mentioned countries and those of Iran. Then, an assessment is made in the role the sustainable financial resources play in providing the finance for urban projects through incorporating public-private cooperation in different areas of activities in the cities and in the access of the institution of municipality to sustainable income. The article concludes with putting forward strategies for reforming the income system of municipalities emphasizing the city of Tehran.

Each idea, to be implemented, before anything else, requires to be defined within a procedural and methodological framework. In the management of urban sustainable transportation, the issues of setting economic, environmental, and social goals, making assessment and feasibility analysis, selecting appropriate economic instrument, determining institutional requirements, budgeting, allocating, enjoying public approval and so on are integral parts of a unified program which necessitates structural-functional concordances in the nature of composition of a city. The current article, based on fundamental experiences of developed and developing countries, delineates the application of economic instruments in the management of urban sustainable transportation within an operational plan framework. However, it should be borne in mind that the mentioned stages would have variations in practice, with regard to the function and the type of urban economy, different types of transportaion, country types, culture types, and social group types. However, odds are that some basic elements, approaches, criteria and experiences due to measures taken would exist constantly, being effective in better management of urban trasnportation towards sustainability.

The current article investigates into the problems in the execution of operational budgeting and has taken into account the case of the budgeting of the municipality of Qom. Attempts are to be made to probe the most important indexes which are related to the problems of execution of operational budgeting and to put forward solutions accordingly. Based on the related literature and also upon the views of the budgeting experts and specialists, such obstacles are referred to as “managerial factors” which are classified in three groups, namely environmental, technical and procedural, and human factors which in turn are assessed by means of fourteen indexes. The method lends itself to a survey research and to test the hypotheses of the research, the required information was collected through questionnaires which were distributed among two groups of viewholders and university professors as well as budgeting managers and experts. The collected data has been fed into the follwoing softwares for further analysis; SPSS, EXCEL and EXPERT CHOICE. The results of the study show that the obstacles to the establishment and execution of operational budgeting in the municipality of Qom are managerial factors. In effect, based on the views of the participants from the two sample groups, the problems of the execution of the operational budgeting are 1)human factors, 2)technical and procedural factors, and 3)environmental factors, respectively, which are related to managerial factors. Thus, it is suggested that in the process of execution of the operational budgeting such obstacles be identified and removed.